Sentimentalist Practical Reason and Self-Sacrifice

ABSTRACT

For obvious reasons sentimentalists have been hesitant to offer accounts of moral reasons for action: the whole idea at least initially smacks of rationalist notions of morality. But the sentimentalist can seek to reduce practical to sentimentalist considerations and that is what the present paper attempts to do. Prudential reasons can be identified with the normal emotional/motivational responses people feel in situations that threaten them or offer them opportunities to attain what they need. And in the most basic cases altruistic/moral reasons involve the empathic transfer of one person’s prudential reasons and emotions to another person or persons who can help them. Practical/moral reasons for self-sacrifice also depend on empathic transfer and can vary in strength with the strength of the transfer.

KEYWORDS:

• Altruism
• practical reason
• self-sacrifice
• empathy
• prudence
• sentimentalism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The issue of what to say about suicidal or depressed people who don’t care about going on living or even, perhaps, about avoiding extreme pain, is a complex one. Where the impulse to suicide realistically reflects the facts of a given person’s situation, there is probably no reason to describe them as irrational or imprudent; so perhaps we can say that where they aren’t being realistic, their error or failing is more cognitive than practical. If they count as irrational and/or imprudent, it is because they don’t or can’t register or carefully enough learn the relevant facts. Similar points can be made about people who are depressed. The idea that putative instances of purely practical irrationality (à la Kant) are better conceived as defects of cognitive rationality is a major implication of Thomas Nagel’s (1970) The Possibility of Altruism – though Nagel himself doesn’t explicitly emphasize this point in the book itself. And in effect what I have just been saying about the suicidal and depressed represents a sentimentalist borrowing from what Nagel was saying on behalf of rationalism. The sentimentalist tends to see what are historically regarded as forms of pure practical irrationality as actually instancing some sort of cognitive defect (as well), and not just in the instances mentioned earlier in this footnote. For example and as we shall see later in this essay, the sentimentalist (or this sentimentalist) thinks it makes more sense to see the empathically deficient psychopath as cognitively out of touch with certain aspects of others than as failing to respond adequately to practical reasons they in fact possess. But such a view of things, as taken either by the rationalist or by the sentimentalist, runs up against the objection, initially launched by J. L. Mackie (1977) that it posits a kind of ‘objective prescriptivity’ in our relations with value matters, i.e. that it treats certain cognitive apprehensions of objective realities as intrinsically capable of also motivating us. Mackie thinks such a notion is ‘queer’, and people like Nagel and myself need to be able to answer this objection. I have given such an answer elsewhere (see Slote 2018; published in side-by-side English-language and Chinese-language versions). However, this is not the time or place to pursue this issue further.

2. Nor would it help Nagel here to point out that common-sense (rational) intuition tells us that we ceteris paribus have more reason to help family members than to help strangers or distant others. This still wouldn’t explain why such a difference exists, and that is precisely what the appeal to empathic transmission allows us to explain.

3. We in the West have conceived of reason as separate or separable from emotion, and this has been thought not only about theoretical reason but about practical reason as well. The present essay gives us (theoretical) reason to doubt or deny that practical rationality is separable from emotion. Rather, as we have seen, it involves and is grounded in emotion. But then there is the other side of rationality, epistemic or theoretical rationality, and the question can naturally arise whether this important dimension or kind of rationality can be as conceptually separate from emotion as we have standardly and traditionally supposed. For reasons given elsewhere, I think the answer to this question has to be in the negative. All theoretical reasons and all theoretical reasoning are tied to belief, and I have argued at length in A Sentimentalist Theory of the Mind (Slote 2014) that belief, all belief, intrinsically involves emotional dispositions. If that is so, then both the main forms of rationality cannot be separated from and necessarily involve emotion(s). This totally undermines the received Western view that reason and emotion are separate and/or separable. (Confucian philosophy, by the way, doesn’t make this assumption.) For the same (theoretical) reasons it also turns out that there is no such thing as pure reason. What I have just been telling you therefore adumbrates a critique of pure reason quite opposite to what Kant meant by the title of his most famous book.

4. Even when someone is unconscious or too ill to feel any relevant reason-constituting emotions, we can empathize with their (in many cases obvious) previous emotion-involving desires, fears and aspirations and have reason to help them on that basis.